My personal
favorite is the first one, but the most curious headline, to me, is the second.
I’d think you should want to tell both father and your mother the good news.
And what parent does not love to hear about the latest in social science
findings from their children?

I have a
multiple-choice question for you.

Which message below do you think is the closest to what the
average person took away from these headlines and stories?

A. There is
no risk to living with someone before you marry.

B. There is no added risk for divorce
in a marriage if you lived with your future mate before marrying.

C. People who only ever cohabited with
the person they marry, after having mutually clarified plans for marriage, are
at no greater risk for divorce or lower marital happiness than those who wait
until marriage to live together.

Got your
answer? If you are paying close attention to the headlines, you may have picked
answer B. I will give you half credit if you did; but only half credit because I
think answer A is the best answer to the question I asked. However, those who
have been reading the media stories carefully may well have gotten the message
in answer B. If you know a lot of research on cohabitation, you might have picked
answer C. But that was a trick answer. Sorry about that. Answer C is close to
what I’d say is a correct answer if I’d asked you what the research shows about
cohabiting prior to marriage—but that is not the question that I asked.

I think
most people absorbing some aspect of these stories (and all those like them) would
have gotten the message that there are no risks to cohabiting. Can I prove that
this is what the average person took away? Not really. It would be a fascinating
research project to test what people concluded from the media buzz. But if I’m
on a limb in this, it seems like a pretty safe one to me. Of the stories I link
to above, I think the third one does give important and interesting nuances,
particularly later in the piece. I do not think you have to agree with me about
what the average person might have understood from these recent stories to
consider other points I’ll make here about various risks associated with some
patterns of cohabiting before marriage.

The
headlines above were sparked by a study just published in the Journal for Marriage and Family. The
study’s author is Arielle Kuperberg of the University of North Carolina,
Greensboro. Her bio
says one of her interests is “examining (and sometimes overturning) modern day
myths about romantic relationships.” I would say that her purported findings are
consistent with this professional interest.

Here are
some quotes from that third story I linked to above:

New
research finds that premarital cohabitation isn't linked with divorce at all.

Arielle
Kuperberg, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, finds
that when accounting for the age of moving in together, there is no difference
in divorce rates between cohabiters and those who moved in after marriage.

"Cohabitation
does not cause divorce — yay," Kuperberg told Live Science, adding the
exclamation because about two-thirds of new marriages in the United States
start with cohabitation.

I like aspects
of Kuperberg’s study. It is novel and clever. In analyzing the risk for divorce
associated with cohabiting prior to marriage, Kuperberg focused on the age that
people moved in together rather than the age at which people marry, finding
that the former is more important than the latter in understanding divorce risk.
When she controls for the age people were when they moved in with their
partners, the association between cohabiting prior to marriage and divorce gets
weaker than it otherwise seems to be. In some analyses, she adds enough control
variables to reduce the association to zero, which is the basis of her
asserting in the media that there is no risk for divorce based on cohabiting
prior to marriage. If that sounds pretty technical, that’s because it is. That
is as technical as I am going to get in this piece. (I plan to write another more
technical comment on her study soon, where I will describe what I like and what
I am concerned about in her statistical procedures.)

At the
heart of it, Kuperberg asserts that scores of researchers have had it wrong for
decades, and that maybe there never has been an association between cohabiting
before marriage and divorce. She asserts that what was misunderstood all these
years is that cohabiters are more likely to divorce, not because they
cohabited, but because they tended to start living together when they were too young
to either be making a wise choice in a mate or to take on the roles of
marriage. This logic is akin to the well-replicated, robust finding that marrying
young is associated with greater odds of divorce. Given that, why wouldn’t moving
in together at a young age also be a problem? Of course it would be. Both
relationship transitions (cohabitation or marriage) result in increased
constraints on your options in life; I and my colleague Galena Rhoades have
been arguing for a while now that it’s important to be making careful decisions
when one is about to go through a transition, like cohabitation, that restricts
future options.[i]

Before I go
further, I should note that social scientists do not have any control over
headlines and have little control over the content of stories on their work.
You can tell in some media reports that what Kuperberg was suggesting from her
study was nuanced, but that does not mean that the average consumer of such
headlines and stories understood a nuanced story or how cohabitation could be
associated with potential risks for her or him.

So, what’s
the problem if someone did assume from the media that there is no risk for
cohabiting prior to marriage, in a pretty general, non-nuanced way? Consider
the following research findings—findings based on many excellent studies:

·Serial cohabitation is associated with greater
risk for divorce.[ii]
In this context, serial cohabitation means living with more than one partner
before marrying. Cohabiting with more than just the person you end up marrying
is associated with poorer outcomes in marriage.[iii]

·Cohabiting unions are decreasingly likely to end in marriage.[iv]

·Cohabiting with your eventual mate before having
clear, mutual plans for marriage is associated with lower marital satisfaction
and higher risk for divorce.[v] Among
those who are currently cohabiting, those with clear plans for marriage have
stronger relationships.[vi]

·Cohabiting before having a mutual and clear
intention to marry is on the rise.[vii]

·The rate of unplanned pregnancies is much
greater among unmarried, cohabiting women than it is among married women.[viii]

·The transition into living together is
associated with sharply increasing constraints of the sort that make it harder
to break-up, yet the kind of commitment (dedication) that is most strongly
associated with happy, strong relationships levels off.[ix]

·Having sex earlier in a relationship is
associated with lower marital quality, partly because moving quickly to sex is
associated with moving quickly to cohabiting. That is, for some couples, sex
too soon leads to cohabiting too soon, which can lead to a poorer foundation
for a marriage.[x](Not sure how that could be? See the prior bullet
point and think about what it may be like to get stuck in a relationship that
is not as good a fit for you as one you might have ended up in if you’d not
made it harder to break up by cohabiting with your current partner.[xi])

These are
solid research findings but you should know that there are different possible
explanations for them. Some aspects of risk associated with cohabitation are
due to what social scientists call selection effects. Selection effects are factors
that can explain why some people experience poor outcomes that appear to be
associated with some behavior (for example, cohabiting) when the poor outcomes
are really more associated with other characteristics in one’s life (for
example, poverty). It is very clear that some of the higher risk patterns
related to cohabitation are more common for people at serious economic
disadvantage. For example, with poverty, one will have additional pressures to
cohabit in situations where it may be extra risky. I refer you to the comments in the later part of the media story at the third link
above; the research by Sharon Sassler is quite thoughtful on such issues.

On the
other hand, these findings I list above surely reflect some aspects of risk
that are causal. That is, at times, a person can make a choice (like not to move
in with a particular partner at a particular time) that improves their odds of
eventually having a lasting, satisfying marriage—which may well be with someone
other than the person they decided not to move in with. When wrestling with
selection versus causality (not my topic today), it’s useful to think clearly
about what a person has or does not have control over. If a person could behave
differently, and choose one option over another that is on a less risky path, that
behavior is causally related to the quality of life.

Spoiler
alert. I think (with important exceptions) that people can make choices that
improve their odds in love and marriage if they understand what is risky and
why. Kuperberg believes this also, as you shall see below, though her current
work is mostly focused on the risk of partnering up at too young an age.

Based on
headlines and some stories in the media, many people may come to believe that
there are no risks inherent in some patterns of cohabitation. But does that
conclusion seem consistent with the findings I just listed?

Imagine a
woman, Susie, who is in her early 20s, who absorbed the message that
cohabitation before marriage is not risky. Maybe she even shared this great
news with her father and mother and friends. Good news is contagious, you know.
She’s been in a relationship for a couple of months with a man named Jake. She
likes Jake, but she isn’t quite sure if he’s right for her (as in, right for
marriage and her future). Since she likes him and wants to see if this could go
the distance—and she’s been reassured in her sense that cohabitation is not
risky—she and Jake go ahead and move in together. Worst case, she thinks, she
can use this time together to test the relationship. (By the way, that’s among the
least good answers you can have for why you might live with someone.[xii])

Now Susie
and Jake are sharing a single address. They don’t take too much notice of the
fact that they have now made it harder to break up even though they are far
from having figured out if they have a future together. It’s just harder to break
up when cohabiting compared to dating.

Susie and
Jake like each other. There is a lot of attraction and, now that they are under
the same roof, there is a lot of sex. This is not exactly a suspenseful
television show where you cannot see where the script-writer is headed. Susie
and Jake have a child—a child they did not plan to have. As noted above,
cohabiting couples are both less likely than in the past to eventually marry,
and they are more likely than couples who have married to have a child that they
did not plan on having. Susie and Jake liked each other enough to move in
together, but they had not developed any kind of strong, mutual commitment to a
life together, much less a commitment to raising a child together.

After
living together for two years, Susie and Jake break up. Since they were living
together and have a child, the process of breaking up took a lot more time and
a lot more pain than it would otherwise have taken. Of course, this is not a
very unusual story. Lots of couples live together before marriage. Many of these
couples move in together before there is any mutual commitment to a future,
before there is any mutual commitment to raise a child together, and before
even any clear discussion or decisions about what living together means.[xiii]Now, in this context, and thinking about
Susie and Jake, does it still sound like there are no risks associated with
cohabiting prior to marriage?

This next
point is pretty crucial, technically. As far as I can tell, Kuperberg’s study
and conclusions do not directly address the type of situation I just described
with Susie and Jake. Her analysis is focused on couples who married and whether
or not those couples had cohabited prior to marrying. But Susie and Jake’s
story is also a story about cohabitation. It is also a story about cohabitation
before marriage. It’s just not a story about their marriage. And it is a story
about higher risk.

Imagine
that Susie had avoided moving in with Jake, perhaps because she was a little
more wary about the implications of moving in with someone she had only known for
two months. In fact, imagine that they do not move in together but, instead,
they continue dating each other—and then they break up three months later. And
they do not have a child. What do you think? Are Susie and Jake better off for
not having moved in together in the first place?

Back to
Kuperberg’s study and report. As I understand her analyses, here is one way to
summarize her findings: For people who only ever live with the one person they
end up marrying, and who do not have a child prior to cohabiting, and who wait
to cohabit or marry until after the age 23, the risk for divorce related to
cohabiting before marriage is very low. I don’t actually believe her study supports
a conclusion that is this strong, but I think it’s close to what one would
conclude if you accepted all the assumptions of her work. In fact, consistent
with this, she gives some advice at the conclusion of her journal article:

This research also suggests that young
couples wishing to avoid divorce would be better served by delaying settling
down and forming coresidential unions until their mid-20s when they are older
and more established in their lives, goals, and careers, whether married or not
at the time of coresidence, rather than avoiding premarital cohabitation
altogether.(Kuperberg, 2014, p. 368)

You may or
may not agree with this advice, but this quote from her journal article is a
lot more circumspect than some of the messages that just blew through our
culture over the past couple of weeks. I come back to where I started. What
message do you think people absorbed with all the recent stories on the good
news about cohabitation? Personally, I’d prefer there to be more caution in the
wind.

ReferencesIf you are interested in a narrative summary of our published research on cohabitation, it's available here.

[ix] Rhoades,
G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2012). The impact of the
transition to cohabitation on relationship functioning: Cross-sectional and
longitudinal findings. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(3), 348 - 358.; for
evidence that constraints make staying together more likely, regardless of
dedication to be together, see Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman,
H. J. (2010). Should I stay or should I
go? Predicting dating relationship stability from four aspects of commitment.
Journal of Family Psychology, 24(5), 543-550.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."